E komo mai. Welcome.

You will find some of the projects and published work I am involved with on this page, some of which are authored on my previous name (Andrade Silva). Most of my work revolves around remote collaboration with different faculty in and outside the U.S. in several domains with structured and unstructured data acquisition and analysis.

Net-Zero Energy Building

Amid growing concerns about rising energy prices, energy independence, and the impact of climate change, statistics show buildings to be the primary energy consumer in the U.S. This fact underscores the importance of targeting building energy use as a key to decreasing the nation’s energy consumption.

One current solution to minimize building energy consumption are net-zero buildings. In the context of this project, a net-zero building is thought of as being capable to generate energy (from solar irradiance) and consume energy through it’s various energy devices. The goal at every year is minimally to be Net-Zero, as Net-Negative will inccur costs to purcharse energy. The energy management, however, is not fully automated by the building: It is the responsability of the building’s users to reach the Net-Zero goal every year.

Understanding key patterns in several types of devices through time and user behavior to identify actionable insight that minimizes energy consumption is the vision of this project.

In the ERDL Lab, my current tasks serve to assist in the creation of a dashboard for net-zero building residents. This is divided into preparing a database of sensor data, and performing sensor data analysis. Learned patterns are then encoded into visualizations that lead residents to make energy-saving decisions to achieve net-zero goals by the end of each calendar year.

An initial report of sensor data analysis of the project can be found on my Rpubs page.

Proactive Cybersecurity

The cybersecurity community typically reacts to attacks after they occur. Being reactive is costly and can be fatal where attacks threaten lives, important data, or mission success. But can cybersecurity be done proactively?

Solar Forecasting

(Master Thesis Plan A) Energy companies in Hawaii have started to use solar energy harvested in power plants as a more cost-effective
alternative to provide energy to consumers. A problem with this renewable alternative is the dependence on weather,
and consequent unpredictability of the next day solar irradiation.

Under the supervision of Dr. Lim and Dr. Stevens, I've been investigating how to identify such patterns using probabilistic models
and information theory.

Social and Code Networks

I am currently investigating with Dr. Kazman , Dr. Apel's Lab in Germany, and Dr. Tamburri in Italy
how various communication channels interactions among software developers relate to code dependencies. Some of the tasks of this project involves data acquisition through APIs,
data pre-processing, network visualization and comparison.

A Tool to Enable Technology Transfer for Aerospace Concepts of Operation

Technical transfer of concepts of operation from NASA research areas into missions or to outside agencies like the FAA is difficult and expensive.
The development of the research prototype does not follow the guidelines specified for operational software. As a result, the research prototypes cannot be transferred directly.
The FAA, for example, instead asks NASA to deliver the requirements and specifications that an outside contractor will use to implement the final system.
In order to meet certification requirements operational software systems are re-implemented following rigorous processes. The reverse-engineering of requirements and specifications
from research prototypes is entirely manual and very costly. This is a significant hindrance in successful tech transfer.This proposal would automate key parts of the process of
requirement and specification engineering and reduce the cost of technical transfer.
As a NASA Intern under Dr. Davies, I did a research survey on current practice of clone detection tools and used open source projects Klee, LLVM and Clang to instantiate a clone
detection tool.

My role in the team was to find, explore, pre-process, and analyze Brazil's Fiscal Year Budget. Across the promised outcomes, my role more closely related to helping craft stories, or by finding and exploring what data is available, help shape the presentation of it through the website and/or API.

This project served as a fine example of "parachuting" in on a project and quickly understanding the materials, identifying goals, and completing the required tasks for sucessful project continuity. Going beyond my individual tasks, I was often referred as the joker's card in the team because I summarized the project vision into a method diagram, and wrote the entire project roadmap.

Tactic Recommender

Together with Dr. Kazman and Dr. Mirakhorli ,
I've investigated how software engineers conduct
web searching for a particular class of code snippets by (1) defining a suitable set of metrics to the problem space from literature review,
(2) performing quantitative and qualitative data analysis to assess the chosen metrics usefulness for a software developer,
(3) incorporate the set of metrics to a bigger set and evaluate prediction performance on recommending code snippets.

"How Toilets Makes People Taller"

World hunger is a problem usually brought to our attention on our everyday lives, however other factors may impact children malnutrition. Identifying such factors can help policy makers decide for
the most appropriate intervention in order to improve people's life in underdeveloped countries.

Under the supervision of ScD. Fan I explored associations between anthropometric proxies of malnutrition (e.g. height, weight)
and sanitation levels in sub-saharan african countries. This resulted in a full article and literature review presented as a class project in Bio Informatics during my MS in Computer Science. Both works received A.

Software Eng. Education

In general, computer programming courses are just focused on the language, constructions, structures, and so on.
We worked on a new approach to teach an introductory computer programming course based on software engineering fundamentals.
We emphasized during class project inter and intra-group software development, code review, issue reporting and other common
software engineering practices.
The approach was applied for 3 years in a university in Brazil and later published on the Brazilian Conference of Software Engineering (CBSoft 2011) .

Univ. Retention Patterns

In Public Universities in Brazil, undergraduate student retention, i.e. students graduating beyond the expected time in their majors, is a recurring problem in education. While the causes have been
throughly studied on different countries, workable solutions for the university are seldom presented. This work identified students usually start falling behind on their freshman years. Furthermore,
we hypothesized that the rearrangement of course workload could help reduce the retention problem after performing rule mining from student coursework choices throughout their student life.
The work was later published on the Brazilian Symposium of Informatics and Education (SBIE 2013).

Software Eng. Effort Metrics

Identifying patterns of effort within software development projects is important for several reasons and a well-studied problem within the SE Community. One problem however is that companies often
do not have available the necessary data or resources to make informed decision and hence benefit of current findings in the literature.
For my honor thesis with Dr. Almeida and Dr. Kazman,
I explored Open Source Projects for proxy
measures of effort using Classic Grounded Theory and Data Exploration methods. Part of this work appeared in the Economics-Driven Software Architecture Journal 2014.

Code Understanding and Navigation

The concept of code smells is widespread in Software Engineering. However, in spite of the many discussions and claims about them, there are few empirical studies to support or contest these ideas.
In particular, the study of the human perception of what is a code smell and how to deal with it has been mostly neglected.
We performed a controlled experiment that extends and builds upon another empirical study about how humans detect god classes.
Our findings published on the International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE 2013) show that participants have different personal
criteria and preferences in choosing drivers to identify god classes.

U. of Hawaii at Manoa

Teacher Assistant

U. Federal da Bahia

At Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil, I taught Databases Lab, as well as Data Structures and Information Retrieval to Information Systems students. I used a combination of Latex, "hand-made" Tikz forms, color, and other visual examples to ilustrate abstract concepts for freshman, together with lecture notes.

Quizes, and projects often followed familiar concepts related to gaming and social media, while coding assignments evolved in difficulty from filling in the blank
to entire group work projects from scratch and cross-group evaluation.

Assistant Professor

You can find the Data Structure class material on my Dropbox, both slides and notes in latex and pdf.

While a student at Universidade Federal da Bahia, I've also worked as a undergraduate teaching assistant for Formal and Automata Languages, Programming Logic for Computer Science, and Paradigms of Programming Languages. In all three classes I gave lectures under supervision of the professor, assisted in creating material and grading, and organized guests coding dojos for the class

Undergraduate T.A.

ink.css knitR

Having to present results every week to peers holding very distinct interests, and being exposed to enough human computer interaction classes based on Don Norman works, led me to grow interest
in everyday design. Of course, reports couldn't be left out. This was a small project I did to rework the reports I usually make for research meetings using R Markdown. You can find the motivation
behind it on this blog post, and the finished product now appearing on all my reports on my RPubs reports.

Design Vagrant Pinterest

This board is a collection of either good or ugly design I found during my walks (and had people staring on me on why I would be taking pictures of trivial things).
It is also a good HCI mental exercise and reminder when creating user/visualization interfaces.
They are always there, but how many did you ever noticed? Inspired by Normans book and my SIT HCI classes during 2012 Spring.

ACM Student Chapter

Between August 2010 and June 2011 I founded the first and only ACM student chapter of Brazil.
I established cooperation between the chapter and other student groups, serving and joining different
students interests for organizing a campus event representing the major, and had the recent founded chapter Featured on ACM XRDS – ACM students magazine, Fall Vol 18 on its
first six months.

ACM Honors Society - UPE

Upsilon Pi Epsilon (UPE) is an honorary society whose membership consists of outstanding undergraduate and graduate students in Computing and Information Disciplines.
Members are chosen not only for their scholastic achievement in a computing science program, but also for distinguishing themselves as true professionals by meeting the standards of the society such as
outstanding talent, high scholarship, high standards, representation of computing science in interdisciplinary communication, and encouragement of individual contributions to society through computing science.

After induction at Stevens Institute of Technology chapter in 2012, I collaborated with the group with local workshops for students and job interview preparations.

IEEE Honors Society - HKN

Eta Kappa Nu (HKN) is the National Honor Society for Electrical and Computer Engineers. Members consist of students, alumni, and other professionals who have demonstrated exceptional academic and professional accomplishments. Student members are selected on the basis of scholastic standing, an impeachable character, and excellent leadership skills.

Science Without Borders Network (Rede CsF)

Rede CsF is a non-profit organization based in Brazil and created by students who were awarded the Science Without Border scholarship from Brazil government, which started in 2012 and I was among the first students.

This grant hosts you a full year (board,housing,health insurance, tuition and a small stipend) abroad at one of the eligible countries. A student investment is very high, but the only return required by the program is for a student to stay in Brazil for the equivalent amount of time. Some of the awarded students, like me, feel that this is not a realistic return to the country for the high investment. This is the purpose of Rede CsF: To connect awarded students by the Science Without Border program to enable projects with anyone interested to perform projects for the country. The focus of the network is on Science, Technology, Innovation and Education.

Within Rede CsF I contribute mostly with data analytics across our online platforms (Website, Facebook Pages and Groups, WhatsApp, Youtube and Trello) and managerial tasks within the network. For instance, I created the Intranet of Rede CsF on Google Apps to help with collaboration of ideas, and share of feedback.